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I seem to remember that one of the rules in the MP TOS says that merchants can set their own creations for sale anywhere they wanted on other sites, but at no cheaper price to disallow bad competition. I might be mistaken, please correct me if I'm recalling this wrong. Well, for starters, cheaper than this there's only free of charge. Add the total fees and we get to next to nothing for hours and hours of work. Secondly, on a personal note, my models are mine and nobody has the right to tell me how to manage them. And as grateful compensation to fuel your business staying up and running, we get nothing except a 40% skim-off from our sales.

What other site are you going to sell a Second LIfe asset on? The actual model that the asset is converted from is a different thing, of course.

I read your post intently. I'll correct you as requested, because you're wrong. The Marketplace is effectively only for things that can be used directly within Second Life. Also, things use within Second Life are generally in a proprietary format that's created during the upload process.

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First, the correction request was about the guideline, prohibiting to sell the same asset on other sites at lower prices. Thanks to that link, yes i was wrong about it.

Though, now i take my own avatars, without even renaming all the joints in the skeleton, and export the whole thing as FBX and set them up for sale, the same exact model, on the Unity Asset store, complete with animations scenes (and animation devkits) for use in engine. As far as a regular engine is concerned, any skeleton goes, even the SL one. It's still the very same asset, although in a different format, still it's the same. Provided that the developer uses Maya, they can animate my characters in a matter of minutes and export their own animations in FBX format. How about that? Can't do? Sorry, you're wrong on this.

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Investigating - We are currently undergoing unscheduled Second Life Marketplace maintenance. Transactions may not be updating, deliveries may be delayed and all other Marketplace information may not be updating in a timely fashion. We ask that you please refrain from making Marketplace purchases until this maintenance is complete. Please check this post for updates.

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'More changes are coming in short order. The ability to filter limited quantity and demo items is just around the corner. A number of improvements for navigating shopping and order history for shoppers, and a way to prevent limited-quantity item redelivery for the Merchants. Mobile-friendly layouts are coming. Additionally, we’re working to improve the ability for Merchants to issue refunds. We’re also planning to give the Marketplace a facelift later in the year, and we’re looking into a way to develop a native vendor system that better connects inworld sales and tracking with Marketplace transactions. '

The ability to filter limited quantity and demo items is just around the corner.

What we asked for is 'demo listings and color/option listings consolidated' so we don't have to filter. Give merchants the ability to sell all colours and demo within one listing.

A number of improvements for navigating shopping and order history for shoppers.

Good for shoppers.Please add features that help merchants too, such as some listed in this thread and recent jiras.

we’re working to improve the ability for Merchants to issue refunds.

Now that you're taking 10% this is actually a necessity (not an improvement). This should have been fixed BEFORE the increase.

We’re also planning to give the Marketplace a facelift later in the year

I doubt I'll be impressed but I'll wait and see.

we’re looking into a way to develop a native vendor system that better connects inworld sales and tracking with Marketplace transactions.

FORGET this one. This sounds more like a threat than an improvement. Why not just say 'we're looking at a way to take a fee from your inworld sales as well'. Stop right there!

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We’re also planning to give the Marketplace a facelift later in the year, and we’re looking into a way to develop a native vendor system that better connects

Oh good, another way to ding us.

What we would like is for info about a marketplace sale, like what was sold, on the Transaction page. Ditto being able to update price etc od multiple items on a manage listings page, like we did with SLX.

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What we would like is for info about a marketplace sale, like what was sold, on the Transaction page.

I think this is where we really see how little understanding LL has of ecommerce.

I've been focusing mainly on listing procedures. That's important for everybody of course but yes, it is especially important for a merchant like me who has a huge backlog of products to list. (I once did the maths and found out that with the current akward listing system i'd have to work 40 hours a week for six months to get all the things I already have ready for sale listed on MP. With software similar to what I once wrote myself for my own website, I could have done it in a week.)

But when it comes to order tracking/history and accounting, LL seems to regard that as a nice addon. It's not, it's the core functionality of any ecommerce solution.

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I think this is where we really see how little understanding LL has of ecommerce.

I've been focusing mainly on listing procedures. That's important for everybody of course but yes, it is especially important for a merchant like me who has a huge backlog of products to list. (I once did the maths and found out that with the current akward listing system i'd have to work 40 hours a week for six months to get all the things I already have ready for sale listed on MP. With software similar to what I once wrote myself for my own website, I could have done it in a week.)

But when it comes to order tracking/history and accounting, LL seems to regard that as a nice addon. It's not, it's the core functionality of any ecommerce solution.

Re backlog: I made spreadsheets so I can keep track of how much I need to list. It really doesn’t do much to inspire me, I hate listing so much,

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we’re looking into a way to develop a native vendor system that better connects inworld sales and tracking with Marketplace transactions.

FORGET this one. This sounds more like a threat than an improvement. Why not just say 'we're looking at a way to take a fee from your inworld sales as well'. Stop right there!

I hear you Rya... What I fear is that doing so, they will break the interface Caspervend system relies on to receive data from MP, so that product tracking and redeliveries will no longer be possible through Casper, de facto cutting it out on purpose. My trust in LL had fallen through the floor many years ago, so much that I didn't think I could distrust them any less than this... I was wrong, it went from "through the floor" to "in the underworld".

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we’re looking into a way to develop a native vendor system that better connects inworld sales and tracking with Marketplace transactions.

FORGET this one. This sounds more like a threat than an improvement. Why not just say 'we're looking at a way to take a fee from your inworld sales as well'. Stop right there!

Thank you for the translation!! Now it suddenly all becomes clear to me. I suggest all merchants brace themselves for what is to come next year. This year was only the beginning of it, the tip of the iceberg i fear... And in the end the ones who will end up paying for everything are the customers/shoppers. I am sure most (if not all) merchants will pass on any possible upcoming LL in-world fees to the customer. And if they don't, then so they should! So, playing SL will become more expensive. Which will make it even less attractive for the newcomers. The oldies who will not be able to afford the new prices will leave, too. If/when LL enforces this new fee system on all in-world sales the end of SL as we know it will be in sight.

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I welcome their vendor system and I'll likely use it. It's the perfect fit for the majority of Market Place merchants; us little guys, trying to simply fund our SL fun and not try to make actual money in such an unusual way (relying on another business, without any fiduciary contract or agreement whatsoever, whose very profits determine your own success or failure.) All these things you complain about: Cost of doing business.

As for your complaints and gripes about this stuff: fair enough. But isn't it an oxymoron to hate on the profitability of the company whose very profit you rely on for your own profit? By demanding, and they implementing, fee cuts and such, isn't that similar to asking the captain to just go ahead and make the boat we all ride on more liable to sink while in the middle of the ocean? Just asking.

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First, the correction request was about the guideline, prohibiting to sell the same asset on other sites at lower prices. Thanks to that link, yes i was wrong about it.

Though, now i take my own avatars, without even renaming all the joints in the skeleton, and export the whole thing as FBX and set them up for sale, the same exact model, on the Unity Asset store, complete with animations scenes (and animation devkits) for use in engine. As far as a regular engine is concerned, any skeleton goes, even the SL one. It's still the very same asset, although in a different format, still it's the same. Provided that the developer uses Maya, they can animate my characters in a matter of minutes and export their own animations in FBX format. How about that? Can't do? Sorry, you're wrong on this.

Theresa Tennyson nods and smiles.

Everything on the Second Life marketplace is a Second Life asset. It has a Second Life UUID, permission flags and other metadata, and is distributed by a Second Life asset server. Linden Labs can only regulate and control Second Life assets.

When you put your model, which is the same model, on the Unity Asset store, it doesn't have the Second Life metadata, nor is it on the Second Life asset servers. It is not the same asset. And even if you were correct about the Marketplace policies about things on other web sites (which you weren't), the Marketplace policies wouldn't apply. Can't do. Sorry, you're wrong on this.

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This is where you are wrong, it is the same asset, since asset means resource, it doesn't depend on the format. A model is an asset in and by itself. The format it is encoded in doesn't matter, the components and the main data is still the same.

What you claim is comparable to saying that a book is not the same because one copy is in rtf and another is in pdf or docx. Of course the metadata changes, there is the need for such stuff to be able to decode the file, but the actual contents are the same.

Look, please refrain from trying to use semantics and get the upper hand on these matters, you can't.

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at the rate this continues, soon there will be no business left to do at all, and i don't mean for SL merchants but for LL themselves. LL are sinking their own ship.

These policies are to help prevent LL's ship from sinking. If that scares you away as a merchant then there will be one less merchant, hardly noticeable. Another merchant will fill the gap, making the disappearance of the first near invisible. Doom-and-gloom proclamations that are always espoused by residents who like to think they know better than Linden Lab about how to run Linden Lab have always been nothing more that Chicken-Little arguments that always never seems to come to pass.

If you are so fearful of the eventual demise of LL by their own policies, perhaps you should cut your losses now and move onto something else that you feel is better? Just saying.

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Here's the rest of Ebbe's response. He makes it clear that he doesn't really know what impact all this will have on retention rates. It's a wait and see experiment.

"EL: ......................... people in the world who are sort-of getting away with not being charged enough or taxed enough for how they use the product. So, we’re trying to shift cost from land to other places.

Also now with this experiment, it will take a while for us to see what will it do to retention rates, and how much more land will people buy or retain over time because of the lower rates. And based on seeing that data and that feedback, we can sort-of speculate on what we can do next.

So right now, we have no plans to do anything other than what we just did, and we need to let that run for a while, and see what the impact of that is. If it doesn’t change any other behaviour, and we’re just charging less, then it might be difficult for us to take additional steps. If we see a positive response in retention rates and land ownership rates, etc., they we’ll be looking forward to taking additional steps."

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If it doesn’t change any other behaviour, and we’re just charging less, then it might be difficult for us to take additional steps. If we see a positive response in retention rates and land ownership rates, etc., they we’ll be looking forward to taking additional steps.

The experiment of shifting costs (not making more profit for LL or helping LL survive), I have a feeling it hasn't really worked. I was on mainland watching the vacant land all around me at the time the extra land came out. I bought more, and so did others around me. They tried to rent it out or resell it and it all failed and the land was once more abandoned, just as I abandoned mine. I'd love to know where the plan has worked, and since Ebbe Linden was forthcoming enough to tell us about the plan, and since we are paying for it, then it would be nice to tell us about the current results of this experiment.

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If that scares you away as a merchant then there will be one less merchant, hardly noticeable. Another merchant will fill the gap, making the disappearance of the first near invisible.

Some interesting statistics there. SLExchange/XStreetSL/Marketplace has been around for 12 years now. During the first six years, about 160,000 stores were added to it and at the end of that period, inworld stores still made up a significant part of SL trade with many fairly large merchants not even bothering with MP. The last six years there have been about 60,000 new stores and inworld store sales have become marginal.

I checked 20 random pre 2013 and 20 random post 2013 stores.

Of the pre 2013 stores 17 were closed or empty, 3 were still open and had a total of 763 items listed - 13, 134 and 613 respectively.

Of the post 2013 stores 11 were closed or empty and four were Gacha resellers. The remaining five had 1-12 listings each totalling 29.

The items in the "old" stores that were still open seemed to be jsut as up-to-date as the ones from the more recent ones.

With the "Spring Cleaning" in March in mind, I would have expected an even bigger difference between closed "old" and "new" stores since there's no way a store that hasn't even been open for two years could have been purged then.

Maybe the selection was too small to draw any firm conclusion (if somebody want to spend time checking a larger number, please do so and let us know the result) but when we also take into account the reduction in the number of stores that open and the reduction of inworld sales I think the conclusion is clear: stores that close are not replaced by new ones.

So supply is shrinking and from what I've heard (but with no concrete data) it seems demand is shrinking even faster so even with fewer competitors, most stores see a reduction in their income. It's clearly a market that is in steady decline and adding an extra burden on it is going to make matters even worse, the only question is how much worse.

You may argue that SL content creation shouldn't be commercial at all and I can actually agree with that at least in principle. LL does not agree though. Their aim is to get more money out of content sales but their strategy is very likely to backfire badly and they'll probably end up with 50% of 10 millions rather than 30% of 20 millions.

Edit: Since I'm playing with numbers.

In the high cost/high wages country I come from there's this rule of thumb that says if a business has a gross yearly revenue the equivalent of 150,000 USD per employee, it's doing fairly well. In a low cost country 50,000 may be more than enough. Apparently LL is struggling to get by with 300,000. It may be the American way for all I know but the internet is international.

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In the high cost/high wages country I come from there's this rule of thumb that says if a business has a gross yearly revenue the equivalent of 150,000 USD per employee, it's doing fairly well. In a low cost country 50,000 may be more than enough. Apparently LL is struggling to get by with 300,000.

Are you counting SL users who withdraw enough money from SL to make a living as employees in this calculation?